Top 4 Strategies to Boost the Efficiency of Laboratory Medical Billing Services
Efficiency is a guiding principle in today’s value-based healthcare environment. To maintain a steady cash flow, healthcare practices must continually look for innovative and efficient ways to streamline their laboratory medical billing services. An efficient medical billing process is an essential part of achieving these goals, but it doesn’t happen automatically.
However, many lab practitioners still rely on inefficient medical billing processes. For example, manual claim processing systems that fail to collect data from patients effectively leads to error and bad debt or delay in the payment collection process. Studies show that a lack of convenient or patient-friendly payment options also results in uncollected payments and loss of millions of dollars every year.
The laboratory billing process doesn’t have to remain so challenging for lab practitioners and patients when implementing the right solutions. Which results in streamlined business operations, increased practice revenue, and patient satisfaction. Here in this article, I will discuss proactive lab billing solutions that help to boost the efficiency of laboratory medical billing services.
- Accurate Patient’s Information
The front-end staff plays an essential role in the entire healthcare RCM. Because they are responsible for collecting accurate information from the patient such as name, age, birth date, multiple phone numbers, address, gender, policy number, insurance ID, and other basic information. They are also responsible for verifying patient’s insurance eligibility and healthcare coverage plans.
Medical billers and coders use this information while preparing claims. Hance, a tiny error in patient’s information leads to expensive claim denials. In order to avoid such mistakes, you can collect copies of insurance cards, IDs from patients. To do so, you can process an accurate claim while collecting correct information that reduces the chances of error.
2. Implementing Electronic Solutions
Implementing electronic solutions (practice management tools & electronic healthcare records) is one of the best strategies to reduce errors and streamline laboratory medical billing services. Claim scrubbing tools and clearinghouses help catch common billing errors that occur most of the time due to human mistakes (e.g., manual claim processing systems).
Electronic solutions help to improve your practice efficiency, save staff time and improve productivity. Make sure that your team has access to advanced billing tools. That helps to keep patient’s information error-free, secure, and safe. So you can assess a patient’s information whenever you need it.
3. Prevent Coding Errors
In medical billing services, medical billers act as invisible engines. They are responsible for putting correct codes for the healthcare services provided to patients. Insurers don’t accept claims that contain coding errors like missing, mismatched or incorrect codes. Moreover, some complicated coding errors result in legal trouble, such as federal penalties, heavy fines, and even imprisonments.
However, unbundling, under coding, incorrect modifiers, and upcoding are the key reasons behind such problems. In order to avoid such coding errors, medical coders should verify and double-check each information before sending a claim to the insurance company.
4. Clean Claims
A clean claim is an essential part of laboratory medical billing services because the payment collection process highly depends on the timely and accurate submission of medical claims. Still, in the 21st century, many practitioners use orthodox methods for data collection, claim processing, and even manual claim submission. That results in discrepancies, errors, and delays in reimbursement.
However, practitioners should avoid using traditional methods and use electronic claim submission tools to improve practice efficiency. Less human interference leads to reduced error and denials. These tools reduce the burden of billers and save their time and ensure accuracy and efficiency in the entire billing process.
Conclusion:
All the above-mentioned solutions help you to improve your practice efficiency. We know that all practitioners don’t have much time to manage, their revenue cycle management procedures efficiently in this challenging deadly pandemic era. That’s why they prefer to outsource their billing services to professionals.
So outsource your laboratory medical billing services to Medcare MSO. Our billing experts have extensive industry knowledge and ensure timely submission of error-free medical claims.
